Donald Trump has been back in office for less than one month, and he, Elon Musk, and his senior administration officials have already plunged the nation into an ongoing constitutional crisis and openly performed various brazen acts of lawlessness and gleeful corruption, while threatening to “look at” judges who object to his onslaught against the U.S. Constitution and legal limits on his power.
On Saturday afternoon, during Presidents Day weekend, the twice-impeached president and convicted felon was, to his credit, honest about it: He believes he’s allowed to break any law he wants.
“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” Trump posted online — not just once, but twice. The president felt strongly enough about the sentiment (which several observers pointed out appeared to be based on an apparently fake quote from Napoleon) that he blasted it out on his own Truth Social site as well as his account on Musk’s platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a message seeking further comment on Saturday.
Trump’s statement bears obvious resemblance to disgraced President Richard Nixon’s infamous line about how “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Like Nixon, Trump has now explicitly stated that he believes he is simply above the law, as any Mad King or debauched emperor should be.
If he’s doing or ordering something that he then says is “saving” the nation, as the logic goes, constitutional limits and legal restrictions don’t apply.
It does not hurt his and his party’s cause that the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority agrees with this premise in many ways. Just last year, the court’s conservative justices blessed Trump’s claims to sweeping presidential immunity, ruling that the president is immune from prosecution for any and all official acts committed as president.
And it certainly doesn’t hurt Trump that virtually the entire Republican Party and conservative movement elite are on his side, quaint things like laws be damned.
And though it may be objectively shocking that a modern American president would repeatedly admit to this, without fear of significant pushback, on a random Saturday, it is regrettably unsurprising for this particular president.
Trump and his legal and political lieutenants have long plotted out what a second term in the Oval Office would look like for him — and for years, they had firmly decided on a ruling legal philosophy of raw power, defined by a simple response to their critics: “What are you gonna do about it?” as one conservative lawyer, who helped plan Trump’s ongoing blitz, described it tersely to Rolling Stone last month.
This is just the way it is now in the nominally democratic United States. There are roughly 200 more weeks to go of this.
From Rolling Stone US
